Adhering to SOC 2 requirements is an ongoing process that calls for defined workflows and constant oversight. It’s not only about meeting an official compliance audit requirement—the ultimate goal is to keep your data safe from ever-evolving threats and malicious parties. Maintaining your SOC 2 attestation also makes it easy to demonstrate your security posture and build trust with clients, partners, and other stakeholders.
To achieve these benefits, you must renew your SOC 2 report at least annually to prove that all your organization’s controls are continuing to operate effectively.
In this guide, we’ll discuss how often you must renew the report as well as other logistics. We’ll also present a straightforward checklist to help you maintain your SOC 2 attestation efficiently and minimize compliance fatigue.
Understanding SOC 2 audit frequency
A SOC 2 Type 2 report includes an observation window — also known as the review period — that typically spans between three to 12 months. This window reflects the period during which your controls were tested for operating effectiveness.
Organizations in the early stages of their security and compliance program and with a time urgency will typically start with a three-month observation period for their first SOC 2 Type 2 audit, with annual recurring audits going forward; the best practice is conducting a SOC 2 Type 2 audit every six months. The reasons justifying the timeframe include:
- Evolution of an organization’s tech stack: As your organization adopts new hardware, software, or services, these changes must align with the SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria (TSCs) to ensure your continued compliance. Continuous monitoring and annual audits help verify that newly implemented components of your IT infrastructure meet security, availability, and other relevant criteria.
- Changes in collected data: Growth or shifts in the volume and type of sensitive data your organization collects and processes may require updates to your security and privacy controls. Recurring SOC 2 audits provide an opportunity to evaluate whether your policies and practices effectively address these changes and maintain compliance.
- Ever-evolving cyber threats: The rapidly changing cybersecurity landscape necessitates ongoing governance and risk management to protect against new vulnerabilities and threats. Recurring SOC 2 audits reinforce your organization's ability to address these risks and adopt updated controls aligned with industry best practices.
{{cta_withimage1="/cta-modules"}} | SOC 2 compliance checklist
How to maintain your SOC 2 attestation: An actionable checklist
Maintaining your SOC 2 attestation will be a more repeatable, predictable process for your team if you follow this checklist:
- Schedule audits in advance
- Perform access reviews
- Review security policies and procedures
- Conduct vulnerability scanning
- Test your incident responses
- Review your data management practices
- Perform a fresh risk assessment
Check out the key action items within each step below.
1. Schedule audits in advance
It’s not ideal to wait until the renewal deadline draws near to schedule your SOC 2 audit. Any haphazard scheduling increases the risk of rushed control reviews that might leave compliance gaps unaddressed, which will only delay your renewal efforts.
A more proactive approach is to schedule the renewal audit and related workflows far in advance. This is especially important if you're undergoing a SOC 2 Type 2 audit, which is more thorough than Type 1 and assesses the performance of your controls over an extended time frame (3–12 months).You might also need time to find a reputable SOC 2 auditor to conduct your audit whether it is a Type 1, Type 2, or both.
After finding an auditor, you may want to execute the following best practices:
- Agree on the estimated audit timeframe and milestones
- Notify department heads and other team members involved in SOC 2 management
- Assign task owners to ensure process clarity and foster accountability
2. Perform access reviews
Access control isa crucial component of several SOC 2 TSCs, most notably Security and Privacy, making recurring reviews of access extremely important. The idea is that as your third-party vendors, employees, and other stakeholders change, they might cause access gaps a malicious actor could exploit.
The best way to prevent this is to perform recurring access reviews with recommended recurrence of at least quarterly. This way, you can stay on top of all the onboarding and offboarding processes throughout the quarter and minimize access risks.
In general, access reviews involve the following steps:
- Identify all sensitive data
- Map the key data access points
- Review the provided permissions at each point
To simplify your recurring audits, you may want to maintain a centralized document to define access levels based on different roles or tiers. You can also use security or access management systems that help identify and revoke excessive permissions easily and make the review process efficient.
Beyond access reviews, you should take additional measures to mitigate other risks related to employee or client offboarding. Your offboarding procedures should particularly include the following security-aware activities:
- Retrieving or disposing of shared equipment
- Revoking access to systems
- Changing shared passwords
3. Review security policies and procedures
Preparing for a SOC 2 audit requires a thorough annual review of your security documentation and processes. The objective is to account for:
- Any potential updates and changes in your organization’s risk environment
- New SOC 2 requirements
You should pay special attention to administrative security tasks and related documentation to verify if your processes and procedures are aligned with SOC 2 requirements. Specifically, make sure to review:
- Evidence collection processes
- Security awareness training practices
- System description (this should be updated ahead of your audit in case of notable changes to the technology, people, and processes supporting your system)
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-modules"}} | Audit ready checklist
4. Conduct vulnerability scanning
Given the increasing complexity of cybersecurity threats, recurring vulnerability scanning is a critical step to identify and address weaknesses in your IT environment, with a recommended cadence of at least quarterly if not more frequency depending on your assets. This proactive approach ensures vulnerabilities that may have emerged since the last audit are promptly uncovered and mitigated.
Vulnerability scans should be supported by the right software and an elaborate process that accounts for your entire IT infrastructure (software, networks, devices, etc.). Using a reliable scanning solution is crucial for understanding and minimizing your potential attack surface.
You also need a comprehensive inventory of your IT assets that covers all in-scope components. You’ve most likely created such an inventory before the initial SOC 2 audit—you’ll just need to make sure it’s maintained and updated ongoingly.
The main challenge here is often a lack of centralization. If your assets aren’t trackable from a unified hub, it will limit their visibility and make potential risks go unnoticed. The best way around this is to opt for capable SOC 2 compliance software that centralizes all your asset information in one place.
Once vulnerabilities are identified, conduct an impact analysis to prioritize them based on severity and risk. Develop and implement remediation plans for significant findings, and maintain a detailed log of vulnerabilities, resolutions, and follow-up actions to ensure accountability and readiness for future audits.
5. Test your incident responses
Incident response plans are essential to cybersecurity, and testing their effectiveness annually is equally essential for ongoing compliance. Changes in the threat landscape can cause your incident responses to become outdated if you don’t update them accordingly.
To maintain compliance, make sure to thoroughly examine your incident response activities, most notably:
- Detection
- Containment and eradication
- Recovery
- Communication with relevant authorities and customers (if needed)
One of the most effective ways to test your incident response plan is through a tabletop exercise. It’s a simulation-based technique that assesses your incident response in a given scenario and lets your team discuss its effectiveness.
By performing a tabletop exercise, you can complete many recurring SOC 2e tasks, such as:
- Identifying security gaps and vulnerabilities
- Building a culture of security awareness
- Documenting your security processes and procedures
6. Review your data management practices
To ensure robust data protection aligned with the SOC 2 criteria, you will need to examine your data handling practices throughout the data lifecycle. Key stages related to the criteria typically include:
- Collection
- Storage
- Inventory
- Retention
- Disposal
You will benefit from creating a clear data flow that lets you understand all the relevant data sensitivity levels and management procedures. You should then conduct a comprehensive assessment of the related security and privacy practices, such as data encryption and pseudonymization.
While performing data management reviews, make sure to account for your third parties. List all vendors, partners, and other parties to whom you disclose sensitive data, and use a security questionnaire to make sure they have all the necessary data security controls in place. If needed, assess and update your contracts and agreements with third parties to remediate any new security concerns.
{{cta_withimage1="/cta-modules"}} | SOC 2 compliance checklist
7. Perform a fresh risk assessment
Regular risk assessments are an important part of maintaining SOC 2 compliance. Your risk profile changes multiple times as your organization grows, including newer instances of security, operational, and more recently, AI risks.
You should conduct annual risk assessments to review it and make any changes to your risk management strategies according to your desired security and confidentiality commitments. You’ll also want to perform third-party risk assessments to identify vulnerabilities throughout your supply chain and partner network.
Comprehensive and ongoing risk assessment involves collaboration across departments, which can create complex workflows and increase the risk of silos or human errors. If you want your SOC 2 preparation to be free from manual busywork and inefficiencies, you should consider leveraging a comprehensive compliance automation solution—like Vanta.
Maintain your SOC 2 effortlessly with Vanta
Vanta is an end-to-end trust management platform that simplifies the process of achieving and maintaining SOC 2 compliance. It maps to 35+ regulations and frameworks—including SOC 2—making your internal compliance and audit workflows smoother.
Vanta’s SOC 2 product leverages automation and 375+ integrations, covering cloud service providers, identity providers, etc., to support regular testing for compliance. The platform can help you conduct hourly checks and maintain continuous compliance across your IT and data components.
Your team will also benefit from the following functionalities:
- Automated evidence collection
- Pre-populated, easy-to-fill system description workflow and template
- Seamless support for SOC 2 audit with option to access Vanta-vetted auditors
- Centralized visibility of security tasks
These features reduce the time and resources necessary to prepare for SOC 2 renewal. More importantly, they let you manage your compliance posture beyond individual audits, allowing you to scale with greater confidence.
Additionally, if you need a trusted SOC 2 auditor, Vanta’s partner network can help. You can browse numerous reputable auditors to support your SOC 2 renewal or other compliance processes.
Request a quick demo to see Vanta’s SOC 2 product in action.
{{cta_simple1="/cta-modules"}} | SOC 2 product page
Streamlining SOC 2 compliance
How to maintain your SOC 2 attestation
Streamlining SOC 2 compliance
How to maintain your SOC 2 attestation
Download the checklist
Streamlining SOC 2 compliance
Adhering to SOC 2 requirements is an ongoing process that calls for defined workflows and constant oversight. It’s not only about meeting an official compliance audit requirement—the ultimate goal is to keep your data safe from ever-evolving threats and malicious parties. Maintaining your SOC 2 attestation also makes it easy to demonstrate your security posture and build trust with clients, partners, and other stakeholders.
To achieve these benefits, you must renew your SOC 2 report at least annually to prove that all your organization’s controls are continuing to operate effectively.
In this guide, we’ll discuss how often you must renew the report as well as other logistics. We’ll also present a straightforward checklist to help you maintain your SOC 2 attestation efficiently and minimize compliance fatigue.
Understanding SOC 2 audit frequency
A SOC 2 Type 2 report includes an observation window — also known as the review period — that typically spans between three to 12 months. This window reflects the period during which your controls were tested for operating effectiveness.
Organizations in the early stages of their security and compliance program and with a time urgency will typically start with a three-month observation period for their first SOC 2 Type 2 audit, with annual recurring audits going forward; the best practice is conducting a SOC 2 Type 2 audit every six months. The reasons justifying the timeframe include:
- Evolution of an organization’s tech stack: As your organization adopts new hardware, software, or services, these changes must align with the SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria (TSCs) to ensure your continued compliance. Continuous monitoring and annual audits help verify that newly implemented components of your IT infrastructure meet security, availability, and other relevant criteria.
- Changes in collected data: Growth or shifts in the volume and type of sensitive data your organization collects and processes may require updates to your security and privacy controls. Recurring SOC 2 audits provide an opportunity to evaluate whether your policies and practices effectively address these changes and maintain compliance.
- Ever-evolving cyber threats: The rapidly changing cybersecurity landscape necessitates ongoing governance and risk management to protect against new vulnerabilities and threats. Recurring SOC 2 audits reinforce your organization's ability to address these risks and adopt updated controls aligned with industry best practices.
{{cta_withimage1="/cta-modules"}} | SOC 2 compliance checklist
How to maintain your SOC 2 attestation: An actionable checklist
Maintaining your SOC 2 attestation will be a more repeatable, predictable process for your team if you follow this checklist:
- Schedule audits in advance
- Perform access reviews
- Review security policies and procedures
- Conduct vulnerability scanning
- Test your incident responses
- Review your data management practices
- Perform a fresh risk assessment
Check out the key action items within each step below.
1. Schedule audits in advance
It’s not ideal to wait until the renewal deadline draws near to schedule your SOC 2 audit. Any haphazard scheduling increases the risk of rushed control reviews that might leave compliance gaps unaddressed, which will only delay your renewal efforts.
A more proactive approach is to schedule the renewal audit and related workflows far in advance. This is especially important if you're undergoing a SOC 2 Type 2 audit, which is more thorough than Type 1 and assesses the performance of your controls over an extended time frame (3–12 months).You might also need time to find a reputable SOC 2 auditor to conduct your audit whether it is a Type 1, Type 2, or both.
After finding an auditor, you may want to execute the following best practices:
- Agree on the estimated audit timeframe and milestones
- Notify department heads and other team members involved in SOC 2 management
- Assign task owners to ensure process clarity and foster accountability
2. Perform access reviews
Access control isa crucial component of several SOC 2 TSCs, most notably Security and Privacy, making recurring reviews of access extremely important. The idea is that as your third-party vendors, employees, and other stakeholders change, they might cause access gaps a malicious actor could exploit.
The best way to prevent this is to perform recurring access reviews with recommended recurrence of at least quarterly. This way, you can stay on top of all the onboarding and offboarding processes throughout the quarter and minimize access risks.
In general, access reviews involve the following steps:
- Identify all sensitive data
- Map the key data access points
- Review the provided permissions at each point
To simplify your recurring audits, you may want to maintain a centralized document to define access levels based on different roles or tiers. You can also use security or access management systems that help identify and revoke excessive permissions easily and make the review process efficient.
Beyond access reviews, you should take additional measures to mitigate other risks related to employee or client offboarding. Your offboarding procedures should particularly include the following security-aware activities:
- Retrieving or disposing of shared equipment
- Revoking access to systems
- Changing shared passwords
3. Review security policies and procedures
Preparing for a SOC 2 audit requires a thorough annual review of your security documentation and processes. The objective is to account for:
- Any potential updates and changes in your organization’s risk environment
- New SOC 2 requirements
You should pay special attention to administrative security tasks and related documentation to verify if your processes and procedures are aligned with SOC 2 requirements. Specifically, make sure to review:
- Evidence collection processes
- Security awareness training practices
- System description (this should be updated ahead of your audit in case of notable changes to the technology, people, and processes supporting your system)
{{cta_withimage22="/cta-modules"}} | Audit ready checklist
4. Conduct vulnerability scanning
Given the increasing complexity of cybersecurity threats, recurring vulnerability scanning is a critical step to identify and address weaknesses in your IT environment, with a recommended cadence of at least quarterly if not more frequency depending on your assets. This proactive approach ensures vulnerabilities that may have emerged since the last audit are promptly uncovered and mitigated.
Vulnerability scans should be supported by the right software and an elaborate process that accounts for your entire IT infrastructure (software, networks, devices, etc.). Using a reliable scanning solution is crucial for understanding and minimizing your potential attack surface.
You also need a comprehensive inventory of your IT assets that covers all in-scope components. You’ve most likely created such an inventory before the initial SOC 2 audit—you’ll just need to make sure it’s maintained and updated ongoingly.
The main challenge here is often a lack of centralization. If your assets aren’t trackable from a unified hub, it will limit their visibility and make potential risks go unnoticed. The best way around this is to opt for capable SOC 2 compliance software that centralizes all your asset information in one place.
Once vulnerabilities are identified, conduct an impact analysis to prioritize them based on severity and risk. Develop and implement remediation plans for significant findings, and maintain a detailed log of vulnerabilities, resolutions, and follow-up actions to ensure accountability and readiness for future audits.
5. Test your incident responses
Incident response plans are essential to cybersecurity, and testing their effectiveness annually is equally essential for ongoing compliance. Changes in the threat landscape can cause your incident responses to become outdated if you don’t update them accordingly.
To maintain compliance, make sure to thoroughly examine your incident response activities, most notably:
- Detection
- Containment and eradication
- Recovery
- Communication with relevant authorities and customers (if needed)
One of the most effective ways to test your incident response plan is through a tabletop exercise. It’s a simulation-based technique that assesses your incident response in a given scenario and lets your team discuss its effectiveness.
By performing a tabletop exercise, you can complete many recurring SOC 2e tasks, such as:
- Identifying security gaps and vulnerabilities
- Building a culture of security awareness
- Documenting your security processes and procedures
6. Review your data management practices
To ensure robust data protection aligned with the SOC 2 criteria, you will need to examine your data handling practices throughout the data lifecycle. Key stages related to the criteria typically include:
- Collection
- Storage
- Inventory
- Retention
- Disposal
You will benefit from creating a clear data flow that lets you understand all the relevant data sensitivity levels and management procedures. You should then conduct a comprehensive assessment of the related security and privacy practices, such as data encryption and pseudonymization.
While performing data management reviews, make sure to account for your third parties. List all vendors, partners, and other parties to whom you disclose sensitive data, and use a security questionnaire to make sure they have all the necessary data security controls in place. If needed, assess and update your contracts and agreements with third parties to remediate any new security concerns.
{{cta_withimage1="/cta-modules"}} | SOC 2 compliance checklist
7. Perform a fresh risk assessment
Regular risk assessments are an important part of maintaining SOC 2 compliance. Your risk profile changes multiple times as your organization grows, including newer instances of security, operational, and more recently, AI risks.
You should conduct annual risk assessments to review it and make any changes to your risk management strategies according to your desired security and confidentiality commitments. You’ll also want to perform third-party risk assessments to identify vulnerabilities throughout your supply chain and partner network.
Comprehensive and ongoing risk assessment involves collaboration across departments, which can create complex workflows and increase the risk of silos or human errors. If you want your SOC 2 preparation to be free from manual busywork and inefficiencies, you should consider leveraging a comprehensive compliance automation solution—like Vanta.
Maintain your SOC 2 effortlessly with Vanta
Vanta is an end-to-end trust management platform that simplifies the process of achieving and maintaining SOC 2 compliance. It maps to 35+ regulations and frameworks—including SOC 2—making your internal compliance and audit workflows smoother.
Vanta’s SOC 2 product leverages automation and 375+ integrations, covering cloud service providers, identity providers, etc., to support regular testing for compliance. The platform can help you conduct hourly checks and maintain continuous compliance across your IT and data components.
Your team will also benefit from the following functionalities:
- Automated evidence collection
- Pre-populated, easy-to-fill system description workflow and template
- Seamless support for SOC 2 audit with option to access Vanta-vetted auditors
- Centralized visibility of security tasks
These features reduce the time and resources necessary to prepare for SOC 2 renewal. More importantly, they let you manage your compliance posture beyond individual audits, allowing you to scale with greater confidence.
Additionally, if you need a trusted SOC 2 auditor, Vanta’s partner network can help. You can browse numerous reputable auditors to support your SOC 2 renewal or other compliance processes.
Request a quick demo to see Vanta’s SOC 2 product in action.
{{cta_simple1="/cta-modules"}} | SOC 2 product page
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Streamlining SOC 2 compliance
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